"A collection of papers in English by one of the foremost historians of the social and economic structure of rural communities, who here examines local societies in rural northern Spain and Portugal in the early middle ages. Principal themes are scribal practice and the analysis of charter texts; gift, sale and wealth; justice and judicial practice. With a focus on practice, on personal relationships and interactions, on mobility and on decision-making, a sense of land and landscape runs throughout. This book offers a substantial corpus of Iberian evidence to set beside Frankish, Italian, English and Scandinavian material and thereby makes it possible for Northern Iberia to play a part in the great debates of early medieval European history that occupy historians"--